I've been playing with demos of a couple of granular synths and am a bit confused. What the hell are you supposed to do with them? No matter what knobs I played with (Oo-er missus) I couldn't get anything even remotely musical out of them. (I've got a pretty loose definition of musical, I write Acid Tekno).
Is there a released tune that uses granular synthesis?

Help me Obi-Wan, you're our only hope.

with granular synthesis, it sorta depends what sound you feed into it as far as getting a "musical" sound. Then again, you could probably put just about any sound into a good granular synth and by setting which grains it plays and at what speed get a "musical" sound out of it (unless its pure noise to start with). If you want to hear some extreme granular synthesis get some autechre - chiastic slide or confield albums - granular sounding stuff throughout those albums.

grainular synthesis can be used to pitch and timeshift sounds without effecting the length/pitch (respectivly).

so besides all the chrunchy abstract noises you can make with it, you can also use it very normally to acheive 'normal' effects. most timestretching software using one form or another of grainular sysnthesis.

If you haven't already tried it, give Fruity Loops 3.5 Demo a try it has an excellent granular synth thats easy to operate. Like said in the previous post great for time shifting and crazy stuttering fx.

Malstrom is really wonderfull.